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Delaware, Cradle of Super Bowl Quarterbacks

NEW ORLEANS — For all the Heisman Trophy winners and national championships that Ohio State, Texas and Southern California have combined to produce, those marquee football programs have never had one of their quarterbacks start a Super Bowl. The same is true for Oregon, Auburn and a host of other traditional powerhouses.

Delaware, however, which competes in the Football Championship Subdivision, has now produced two: Rich Gannon of the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XXXVII and Joe Flacco, who will start for Baltimore against San Francisco on Sunday. The only colleges to produce more are Notre Dame, Purdue, California and Alabama, each of which has had three. (Colin Kaepernick, the 49ers’ starter, went to Nevada, and will be that university’s first Super Bowl starter.)

Even outside of Super Bowl starts, Delaware, led for years by the Hall of Fame coach Tubby Raymond, has produced an almost staggering number of N.F.L. quarterbacks for a university that does not play in the Football Bowl Subdivision. Including Flacco and Gannon, Delaware has had five quarterbacks drafted by N.F.L. teams, and a sixth, Pat Devlin, signed as an undrafted free agent. While U.S.C. may have had a whopping 21 quarterbacks drafted over the years, Texas, for all its storied history, has had only six.

“I think it has a lot to do with being put in a situation with a little more freedom,” Scott Selheimer, Delaware’s sports information director, said of the team’s unusual success. “There’s also a certain amount of luck involved in ending up in the right situation.”

The right situation for Flacco was a team that would give him a chance to get on the field. Having initially gone to Pittsburgh, he found himself stuck on the bench with little hope of getting off it.

“The bottom line is they had Tyler Palko that year who was the starting quarterback,” Flacco said. “I wasn’t and I just felt like I had the ability.”

Photo

The Ravens’ Joe Flacco will become thesecond quarterback from the University of Delaware to start a Super Bowl.Credit
Matt Slocum/Associated Press

After redshirting his first year, and then serving one season as Palko’s backup, Flacco initiated the transfer process to Delaware, sitting out a year before he was eligible to play for the Blue Hens.

He had reasonable success in his first season with Delaware, but became a star in his second and final season, breaking a number of Blue Hen records, leading the team to the F.C.S. national title game, and attracting enough attention from scouts for him to be selected by Baltimore with the 18th pick of the 2008 draft.

Both Selheimer and Flacco speculated that a key to Delaware’s success in quarterback development was finding players who were stuck elsewhere and looking for a place where they could be creative and thrive.

“Historically, it’s been a pretty good program for a I-AA school,” Flacco said, referring to the previous name for the F.C.S. “It’s also a pretty good recruiting tool, for a I-AA school to have 22,000 fans show up to every one of your games.”

Founded in 1743, Delaware has had plenty of famous alumni, including three signers of the Declaration of Independence and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. But Darelle Riabov, the president of the university’s alumni association and a former Blue Hens cheerleader, thinks the student body will be incredibly excited to see one of their own on football’s biggest stage.

“We have 157,000 alumni worldwide and we expect that many of their eyes will be glued to the Super Bowl,” Riabov said. “Flacco is closely followed throughout Delaware and the region. At both Blue Hens and Ravens games, it’s not uncommon to see a mass of UD and Ravens No. 5 jerseys.”

After Gannon’s poor showing for Oakland, throwing five interceptions in a loss to Tampa Bay, Blue Hens fans will have to hope that Flacco can do their university proud.

Correction: February 10, 2013

An article last Sunday about the college alma maters of quarterbacks who started the Super Bowl misstated, in some copies, the given name of one of the six Delaware quarterbacks to sign with an N.F.L. team. He is Pat Devlin, not Scott. And an accompanying map located Morehead State University incorrectly. It is in the northeastern part of Kentucky, not in the western part.

A version of this article appears in print on February 3, 2013, on page SP6 of the New York edition with the headline: Delaware, That Cradle Of Quarterbacks. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe